Myth
as Parasite / Image as Virus: (Re)Locating Authorship, Publicity and
HIV/AIDS in the Work of General Idea
Derek Rushton
Program
in Visual & Cultural Studies,
University of Rochester
This paper extends out of a larger project that seeks to investigate the
dynamic between art and activism in response to HIV/AIDS as it has taken
on a distinctive form in the city of Toronto due to the extensive
formation of alternative political networks and a lively artist-run
center scene. Identifying local shifts in the multiple discourses
surrounding HIV/AIDS activism in the city I critically engage with the
work of artists that had their origins in these non-commercial spaces,
addressing issues of gay culture and community in their work followed by
a definitive and committed response to the onset of HIV/AIDS throughout
the city. An integral part of this project is an in-depth analysis
of the work of the artists’ collective General Idea. Beginning
in the late 60’s, the formation of General Idea parallels the active
participation in alternative and public spaces around the city with an
equally committed concern and involvement in identity politics.
Their work, however, makes a significant departure beyond an engagement
with local politics and activism to include both a committed critique of
the making of art and its dissemination in a wider marketplace.
General Idea’s work effectively questions and plays with various
aspects of authorship, myth, publicity, and the political economy of
design across many urban landscapes. Both utilizing and playing with
democratization as a means of production, these concepts became tools
for forming and re-locating alternative geographies of resistance in
response to the AIDS crisis.
Perhaps most well known is their appropriation and transformation of
Robert Indiana’s LOVE logo into an AIDS logo. The
project became one of General Idea’s most ambitious and important
media interventions in response to HIV/AIDS. Most recently, as
Toronto prepared to open the 16th International AIDS
conference, officials of the Royal Ontario Museum and artist AA Bronson,
the sole surviving member of General Idea, unveiled a graffiti-covered
metal edition of the logo outside of the museum. AIDS has
been displayed in many forms and in many public spaces around the world.
Looking at all of their AIDS-related work a number of questions
continue to surface. What
kind of activist aesthetic was being produced within the parameters the
collective was working with? What resonance does this work have
today? This paper considers how General Idea’s tactical
inhabitation of the forms of mass culture functions to blur the
boundaries between text and publicity and open up sites for potential
agency across the urban landscape. Extending Beatriz Colomina’s
analysis of the relationship between architecture, design, mass media,
and the parallel relationship between privacy and publicity, I question
how, and what kind of critical space is created in General Idea’s
re-drawing of boundaries between mass media, design culture and the
politics of HIV/AIDS.
